Break

I had been collecting instances of cultural interpretations of plate breaking for a few years. I knew I wanted to do a project that isolated and repeated plate breaking over and over, but I could not settle on the form or the material of the project. I was at a talk on a work in 16 mm film and much of the discussion centered on issues of sentimentality, the archive, and the transitional nature of 16 mm film, which Kodak has announced it will discontinue. Listening to the debates about 16mm film was like an audio mirror into various ideas I had been exploring about dishware. I knew I wanted to pair plate breaking and 16mm film as an abstract material pairing – materiality fraternal twins in parallel cultural flux.

Projected on opposite walls are the image of people approaching a column of plates and, in anyway they chose, breaking them. Never able to see the two columns at that same time, the audience looked from one wall to the other, with 150 feet of exposed 16mm film looping in the center of the room. The exposure of this multi-variant action of the break, from anger to joy is visually linked by the exposure of the film slowly wearing away as it circles through the room between the images.